As with fox-hunting, the attack has necessitated various illogicalities and a large dose of hypocrisy to enable any kind of justification for the changes proposed. There is every reason to believe that, if the attack is at all successful, it would cause harm rather than good.

Chris Woodhead, in an excellent speech towards the end of the conference, clearly did not think the attack was too serious. He said that giving up charitable status would add four per cent to fees and that this would not be significant given the large fee increases of recent years.

Four per cent would, of course, do some damage - to those who are struggling to afford private education and for whom this would be the last straw. But there is a worse threat which he did not mention. It is possible that schools may not be allowed to give up charitable status. A school that does not do as it is told and do the charitable activity required, may not be permitted to 'go commercial'. Its assets were created by charitable donations and the law could easily say that they must remain for charitable use. The assets could be removed and assigned, perhaps, to some other charity. (Whether it would necessarily be another private school or, say, a charity supporting state schooling the lawyer did not say.)

So the real threat is that private schools will be closed down if they do not obey. The chances are, in the circumstances, that they will obey.

What is wrong with that? Isn't charitable activity a good thing? Yes, I certainly agree with that. But this is not charity. This is an extra tax under the guise of charity. Charitable activity is voluntary. This is not voluntary. It will be done under threat of closure. It is more like extortion.

Two essential points are missed - deliberately - by the government:

1. Parents at private schools are already paying for their children's education twice. They are paying through their taxes. Since they do not use the state education they are buying with their taxes, they are effectively already paying state scholarships for two or more of the children of other people. Then they pay the private fees. So they pay twice. Making private schools do a lot of charitable work - perhaps free places for children of parents without much means - would mean they would pay three times. This is unjust and penal. It is a discouragement to private educaiton. Deliberately so.

2. One of the fastest growing kinds of schooling is that provided by relatively low-cost faith-based schools. The customers are not rich - one of them whom I met was a single mother living on a council estate who gave up 40 per cent of her income to save her children from a crime-producing state school and put them in an evangelist school instead. If such schools are taxed, this would be obscene. But if such schools are not taxed, on the basis that it would be taxing those who are of below average means, this would mean that schools suffered taxation depending on whether the customers were rich or poor. Private education of the poor would be untaxed, education of the rich would be taxed. The brutal fact that this proposed change in law is an attack on the wealthy - that class hatred, is the motor - would be exposed.

Another underlying truth about those who favour this change: they hate private schooling and its growth because it suggests that state schooling is not good enough. The truth of this is something which they loathe to admit. The easy way to dispose of the uncomfortable suggestion is to make life as hard as possible for private schools and, if possible, destroy them.

Of course it is said that private schools 'get a tax break'. That is absurd. In the first place, the parents pay twice, as already mentioned. In the second, education should not be taxed anyway. It does not have to be regarded as a charity to be regarded as a 'good thing', like medical care. Private medical does not suffer VAT. Nor should private education.

It is also said that private education is divisive. No. It is state education that is divisive. It is state education that creates seriously badly educated children. It is state education that has produced an adult population a fifth of whom are functionally illiterate. State education has created a divide in society that private education would never have done.